"Congress snuck into the spending the bill will be more galling to some, because it amounts to a pay raise for the two unpopular political parties: It raises the $32,400 maximum that donors could give the Democratic National Committee or Republican National Committee to a whopping $324,000 per year, gutting what’s left of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law. The Washington Post says this was inserted on page 1,599 of a 1,603-page bill (!!!)."

Time to relaunch the blog again. This would be the 5th iteration of the blog*. This time, launched on Ghost. A couple of notes to ponder. I am writing because... no reason. It's just words of expression that want to happen. I have not blogged in 4 years, and not regularly in over 6 years. I expect the content will be radically different than the most recent blogging that went on here, as it won't be just about politics, for sure. I guess what has most spurred me on to writing again is beginning a PhD program at George Mason. This first semester, as I get back into the habit of being able to churn out 10-20 page essays, has relighted the spark. Everything is different, every day is the beginning of a new experience. That's what we have to live for in this world, enjoy it and make the best of it while you still have the time.

*I count the iterations by the launch platforms since 2001, when the first re-launch, after writing in html on the site since the late 90's happened; that was with Grey Matter, the first blog cms with comments. Both TPM and Political Wire were using the cms, so I installed it too, but went a step further by turning on the comments. That changed everything. The second relaunch happened in late 2002, with Movable Type, and the website became a fulltime community political blog; the third with Scoop in 2003-2008, the height of the Netroots; the fourth, with the Webstrong Netroots blog platform, for 2009-2010, when the blog went dormant. Ghost, this newest interation, is a open source JS application. My friends in Brazil, Gustavo Costa and Daniel Dhremer installed it a day while they were here in the DC area.

You're live! Nice. We've put together a little post to introduce you to the Ghost editor and get you started. You can manage your content by signing in to the admin area at <your blog URL>/ghost/. When you arrive, you can select this post from a list on the left and see a preview of it on the right. Click the little pencil icon at the top of the preview to edit this post and read the next section!

Getting Started

Ghost uses something called Markdown for writing. Essentially, it's a shorthand way to manage your post formatting as you write!

Writing in Markdown is really easy. In the left hand panel of Ghost, you simply write as you normally would. Where appropriate, you can use shortcuts to style your content. For example, a list:

Item number one

Item number two

A nested item

A final item

or with numbers!

Remember to buy some milk

Drink the milk

Tweet that I remembered to buy the milk, and drank it

Links

Want to link to a source? No problem. If you paste in a URL, like http://ghost.org - it'll automatically be linked up. But if you want to customise your anchor text, you can do that too! Here's a link to the Ghost website. Neat.

What about Images?

Images work too! Already know the URL of the image you want to include in your article? Simply paste it in like this to make it show up:

Not sure which image you want to use yet? That's ok too. Leave yourself a descriptive placeholder and keep writing. Come back later and drag and drop the image in to upload:

Quoting

Sometimes a link isn't enough, you want to quote someone on what they've said. It was probably very wisdomous. Is wisdomous a word? Find out in a future release when we introduce spellcheck! For now - it's definitely a word.

Wisdomous - it's definitely a word.

Working with Code

Got a streak of geek? We've got you covered there, too. You can write inline <code> blocks really easily with back ticks. Want to show off something more comprehensive? 4 spaces of indentation gets you there.

.awesome-thing {
display: block;
width: 100%;
}

Ready for a Break?

Throw 3 or more dashes down on any new line and you've got yourself a fancy new divider. Aw yeah.

Advanced Usage

There's one fantastic secret about Markdown. If you want, you can write plain old HTML and it'll still work! Very flexible.

That should be enough to get you started. Have fun - and let us know what you think :)